Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

EXPERIMENT AND FAIL FAST

The phrase fail fast is used throughout the startup ecosystem and has come to encapsulate the notion of continually trying new things, measuring the results, and either modifying the approach or doubling down, depending on the outcome. Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup and the corresponding activity around the lean startup methodology has recently popularized this.

This approach is a key attribute of vibrant startup communities. Think of your startup community as a lean startup—one that needs to try lots of experiments, measure the results, and pivot when things aren’t working. It’s not that you should fail fast across the entire startup community; instead you should fail fast on specific initiatives that don’t go anywhere, attract little interest, or generate no impact.

Within a startup community, there are often grand plans that are defined at the outset of a new set of initiatives. This especially happens when one of the feeders tries to play a leadership role, a broad new program such as Startup Colorado emerges, or we enter an election cycle and the new administration (federal, state, or local) starts a new innovation-related program. Although some of these programs are additive, they often have a long list of objectives to accomplish without any real thought to the weighting or impact of the specific initiatives.

Many of these initiatives don’t work or shouldn’t work. However, because they’ve been defined as part of the overall objectives of ...